Particle counters have been used for decades in manufacturing or industrial applications to measure particulate quantities in air, gases or liquids. Typically such counters would also bin particulates by size. These size bins vary by application and often by instrument. A particle counter has at least one size channel and popular counters can have 6 or more channels. Typically these size channels discriminate pulses based on the pulse height of the incoming signal. The pulse height refers to the peak voltage of the signal. Sometimes there is also rudimentary discrimination of pulse width, often in hardware.
These systems provide a go/no-go qualification for an incoming pulse, typically they are implemented in hardware and provide a simple gate function such that pulses below a minimum duration are excluded from counting. The intent is to reject noise, typically at the most sensitive resolution where the signal-to-noise ratio is the poorest. However such particle counters are limited in their scope of particle size they can detect, are difficult to calibrate and don't have a means for detecting equipment failure. Therefore, what is needed is a system and method that allows detection of a wide range of particle sizes that is easy to calibrate and determine failures.